Not only do we encourage students to engage in scholarly conversations at conferences, we encourage them to share the relevance of anthropological perspectives and skills with the public. Digital examples of public anthropology projects produced by our seniors will be available soon via our social media, and for those of you on campus, we invite you to stop by Upham Hall to see our new student-created digital touchscreen map of Upham Hall’s anthropological resources and collections, including 3-D images of some of our artifacts.
May is also a time of transition. For some students it is for transitioning from classroom work to field work. For example, the Rebecca Jeanne Andrew Award and the Spielbauer Funds enabled four students to conduct field research on wooly monkeys with Dr. Kelsey Ellis in Ecuador this summer. Four additional students are embarking on Summer Scholars, Dean’s Scholars, and the Goldman Scholars individual research projects.
For other students, it is a time for transitioning into the next chapters of their lives, as they start graduate school or employment in many diverse career paths with their anthropological perspectives and Miami-honed skills.
This May was also bittersweet as we also celebrated the retirements of two faculty: Dr. Perry Gnivecki, who has led the archaeology program on the Hamilton campus for over 15 years, and Dr. Linda Marchant, the founding Chair of the Department of Anthropology who has been teaching biological anthropology including primatology for 30 years. We shall miss them keenly but are excited for them as they too embark on the next chapters in their lives. If you wish you reach either Linda or Perry, and you can continue to reach them using their Miami email addresses: marchalf@miamioh.edu and gnivecpl@miamioh.edu.
If you are thinking of traveling to Oxford area, please be in contact with me. I would welcome the opportunity to catch up with you and to invite you to engage with our students, inspiring them with the career paths you have taken.
By way of closing my reflections, I turn to the inspiring Jane Goodall, “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
I wish you a summer of opportunities for making a difference.